A second son requires a second watch design

Independent watchmaker Eva Leube said she hopes to present her new model by the end of the year.

"I feel so on my way right now," said independent watchmaker Eva Leube. "I realized that life is short and I want to do something that resonates with me."

Over the years, her work in watchmaking has taken Ms. Leube the world, from his native Berlin to jobs in Cape Town; Boca Raton, Florida; Sydney, Australia; and several locations in Switzerland. For more than two decades, the watchmaker has restored and repaired timepieces for both big brands like Rolex and Ulysse Nardin and small companies like Chronos Watchmakers and Thomas Prescher.

Ms. Leube has never forgotten the joys of making its own watches. "When you have a handmade watch, it has a completely different soul," Ms. Leube, 50, said in a phone interview from her home on Lake Zurich in Switzerland.

The soul has occupied Ms. Leube's mind a great deal over the past few years. In June 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, she quit her job in Australia, moved her family back to Switzerland and finally decided to strike out on her own. Again.

Mrs. Leube launched its first handmade watch, the Ari, in 2007. The watch, which took four years to develop, had a mechanical movement in a rectangular case about 52 millimeters long and just over 21 millimeters wide (about 2 inches by 1 inch) that wrapped around the wrist. The following year, she founded Eva Leube Watchmaking.

In the 1910s, Swiss luxury watchmaker Movado introduced the first watch with a curved case, called the Polyplan. But Ms Leube went further with the Ari, creating a more pronounced arc and turning the watch mechanisms up so they could be seen through the case, rather than down as is usually the case. case in more traditional watches. a bit,” she said.

She made two of the watches; one, in platinum, sells for $92,000. And over the years it's had requests for design changes – the most recent from a man who wanted to dive with it. “Ari is a dress watch; diving is not the idea," she said.

"Ari remains that iconic holy grail," said Adam Craniotes, President and Founder of RedBar Group, the world's largest community of watch collectors with more than 80 chapters worldwide." He continued; "Eva did something no one had done before; there was no need to manufacture this watch. It's a fantastic creation. But it's just so good. As an independent watchmaker, Eva, if she wanted to, could choose to never invent anything again and keep making Ari, because she planted her flag so deeply with this watch."

The "problem," Ms. Leube joked, is that she now has two sons: Ari, 15, and Leif, 10. "I named my first watch after my first son, but my second son, Leif, he needs a watch now."

During the first few months of unpacking in Switzerland after the last move, Ms Leube said she "felt drawn" to an unusual move that she had stumbled across. This discovery proved to be the last nudge she needed to start designing and manufacturing independently again.

"That's what we call it a Phoenix movement; it's a cool automatic system that I've never seen in my entire career," said Ms. Leube, who purchased 33 of the movements. She plans to completely rework them, "except the wheels; I'll definitely use the wheels, but I'll change everything else."

For six months she has been in the drawing and building phase of the new design named after Leif (pronounced "life"), and Ms. Leube said she hopes to present the timepiece before the end of the year.

"It's a self-winding watch, and it's trying to kind of skeletonize the movement while also focusing on making a nice case and a nice dial," said Christian Klings, a independent watchmaker based in Dresden, Germany, who, like Ms. Leube, uses traditional tools to create bespoke. -pieces made.

The two met at a workshop in 2005 and now talk to each other a few times a month, chat...